Search This Website

Share & Search

'The pride of Shanghai' ... or a cynical publicity stunt?

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

DOUBTS have been raised about "the pride of Shanghai" - members of the public who helped a pregnant woman who had fainted - after it emerged they included actors working for an online promotions company.

Questions are now being asked if the whole episode, which became an Internet hit after footage was posted online, was a publicity stunt.

Web users praised the good Samaritans, contrasting their actions to the high-profile case concerning Wang Yue, a two-year-old girl in Guangdong Province who died last Friday after she was twice run over and ignored by 18 passers-by as she lay badly injured.

Erma Shanghai Co, the company that employed the actors, insists they simply happened to be in the area at the time and helped out.

Shanghai No.1 People's Hospital, where the nine-months pregnant woman was said to have been taken on Sunday, told Shanghai Daily they admitted no patient matching that description.

The pregnant woman, surnamed Zhang, her sister and a helper did not answer calls requesting interviews.

And the white Volkswagen Polo said to have ferried the woman from Luxun Park to hospital has been found to belong to Erma Shanghai Co, a subsidiary of Erma China, a company famous for organizing promotional activities.

Web users also claimed that a man who, at the end of the clip, says in the Shanghai dialect, "just call us Shanghainese," appears in a Erma Shanghai promotion.

Wang Yang, a director with Erma Shanghai, admitted to Shanghai Daily yesterday that some helpers in the video are its employees and that the car belongs to them.

But he denied staging the incident. "Our employees happened to be there, witnessed the incident, and volunteered to help," said Wang.

Wang said skepticism surrounding the incident reflected a cynical society. "I don't understand why nowadays no one actually believes in good deeds," said Wang.

He referred to the case of Wang Yue, and how a garbage collector who came to the child's aid found herself accused of ! trying t o promote herself to get famous.

Wang asked: "In such a society without trust, where every helper is regarded as an actor, who would offer a helping hand to anyone?"

The doubts have stirred up more controversy over whether Chinese society is growing more selfish.

One web user dismissed the incident as "a purely commercial act, cheating thousands of people." But another netizen said they were just glad that "some people are trying to awaken people's good conscience."

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE former investment director of Shanghai-based Everbright-Prameric Fund Management Co was yesterday sentenced to three years in jail with three years' reprieve for insider trading. Xu Chunmao, who the Jing'an District court heard had been in the mutual fund business for more than seven years, was also fined 2.1 million yuan (US$329,437). Xu was the first Shanghai-based asset manager to be sentenced for insider trading, the court said. Xu made more than 2.09 million yuan in illegal profits and that has been confiscated. Xu, 37, abused his position at Everbright-Prameric from July 2006 to April 2010 by leaking investment tips to three of his former university classmates, the court said. The three would buy shares of certain companies on Xu's advice before or at the same time his firm bought into the companies, the court said. The group traded a total of 68 stocks in this way with a combined investment of more than 95 million yuan. China has been stepping up supervision o…

DOCTORS during a Shanghai Children's Medical Center removed a 3-centimeter needle from a heart of an eight-year-old boy, who was discharged yesterday. Parents took Wang Pengfei, a tyro from Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, to a Suzhou sanatorium for checkup after he felt stomach sickness. X-ray hearing found a shadow in his heart. Under a doctors' suggestion, he was brought a Shanghai Children's Medical Center final Tuesday. A serve checkup found a needle-like object in a boy's heart. It was damaged in to dual with one partial in a chest flesh as well as another in a heart. Doctors motionless to work upon a child immediately since a damaged needle could wandering serve in to a heart through heartbeats. The operation took about one hour final Thursday as well as a complete needle, rusty as well as stranded with surrounding tissues, was successfully removed. Both a child as well as his relatives could not recall how a needle entered his body. Doctors guessed a needle pierced wi…

SHANGHAI residents will soon have a new place for outing when the Sunland Ecological Park in Pudong's Waigaoqiao area is completed next year, officials said yesterday. Construction of the 3.35-square-kilometer park, about 2.4 times the size of the Century Park, began yesterday. The new park will have no boundary walls and will consist of a big lake, a peony garden and a sports park. It is part of the Sunland Eco-Community Project that also includes shopping malls and an international community to cater to the needs of about 210,000 workers and 7,000 firms in the Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone. Greenery and water area will cover 70 percent of the eco-community, said Lu Qin, deputy director of administration at the Shanghai Waigaoqiao Co Ltd. All the green space will open to the public for free except for some private sports clubs, he added. The sports park will have a golf course, a rugby ground, a track and field, and a cycling trail around the lake. People can play sports or watch in…